18 January 2010

Nokia Ovi Store Policies on SaaS / subscriptions: fail

I have an interesting business idea. I'll develop a mobile application with some interesting functionality, and I'll give it away for free. The application will contain an option to upload some data to a remote server, which you will then access from any computer as a regular site. The website will have some advanced features to analyze the data etc etc. The site will operate as SaaS, with a free 30-day trial. Basically, the site will make the real money, in a way similar to what FeedDemon and NewsGator tried a few years ago in a different market.

Now, if I wanted to do that on Nokia platforms, I would try and put my mobile app on the Ovi Store as a free download, right? After all, it will be a useful program in its own right, with the online services being 100% optional. Nokia / Ovi get a free, useful app enriching its (crappy) customer experience, the developer gets a big distribution channel, it's a win-win!

You are prohibited from collecting future charges from end users for Content that those end users were initially allowed to obtain for free. This is not intended to prevent distribution of free trial versions of Your Content with a later upsell option to obtain the full version of the Content. Such free trials for Content are permitted. However, if You want to collect fees after the free trial expires, You must collect all fees for the full version of Your Content through the Program. In this Agreement, "free" means there are no charges or fees of any kind for use of the Content. All fees received by You for Content distributed via the Program must be processed by Nokia.

Now, I can see the motive behind such a "racket clause". Nokia doesn't want Ovi to end up a cesspool of trialware, or to be associated with "click once and pay forever" scams. But the rule is too broad, and it reads like any SaaS scenario is simply out of the question (especially when you consider that Ovi does not support "subscriptions" at the moment, only one-off payments). SaaS is probably the best revenue model in the software world at the moment, and Nokia is telling developers they can't use it.

I honestly do not know if Apple put similar restrictions in place on their store. They probably did (and then some), control-freak as they are, and this is why I wouldn't want to touch the iPhone ecosystem with a barge pole. But Nokia was supposed to be trying hard to regain developer mindshare...

So the question I'd like to ask, before I shell out for the Ovi "publisher" license, is: dear Nokia, my application does something useful on your mobiles. It will then, optionally, send some data to my server, and I will personally collect money to have people access that data on the web, aggregated in various ways. Can I put the app on Ovi?